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The Flowing Waters of Human Kindness

Every time I think this community can’t top itself for its capacity for giving they slap me in the back of the head (not literally) and say “Hey Tim: what do you think about that”!
But let me backup.
It began with a phone call on Thursday, January 28th, from radio show host Bill Keeler: “Hi Tim, I have an idea…”
Uh oh….
Bill wanted to do a water drive for Flint: it took me about three seconds to say yes and to commit get ‘Boilermaker Nation’ energized.
A team of folks was quickly assembled to get the water flowing.
A day later we were collecting water at the Comets game garnering over a hundred cases (2,400 bottles)-not bad.
On to Monday, Chanatry’s supermarket offers Nirvana water at $1.99 a case as well as allowing a Utica Mack truck to be parked in their lot. A nice community connection: local store, local water stored in a local truck.
Well the floodgates opened!
There was a seemingly endless flow of shopping carts (and an occasional cart traffic jam) loaded with cases of water flowing from the stores exit door to the truck.
It became pretty quickly clear we were going to need a bigger truck!
In came the 40 foot trailer.
By the end we did fill a bigger truck- in fact we filled three of them!
Clearly from a logistical perspective it would have been much easier to have people pay the cashier, we keep track of the amount of cases, send the final order up to Nirvana and at the end of the campaign send the trucks westward to Flint.
A lot less handling and a lot less hassles!
And I’m convinced it would not have been as successful: efficiency does not always equate to success when emotion is involved.
I think the key was what I call the power of human touch, the folks donating the water wanted to personally hand that case of the water to the folks loading the truck, who (I believe) physically represented, the people of Flint.
At the wrap-up Friday morning I said it sort of felt like the American Heart Run and Walk Radiothon as organizations stopped by and pledged literally hundreds of cases of water.
We even ended up with a long-haul trucker who volunteered to drive the water to Michigan!
So in the end roughly 100,000 bottles of water will find their way to the hands of those in need in Flint.
Sadly, that’s one bottle of water for each citizen of Flint.
The Mayor’s office in Flint said they have never seen a municipality in the U.S. do what our community did- I guess no surprises.
Sometimes we as a community are very hard on ourselves: sometimes rightfully so, most of the time, in my opinion, not.
To all that participated, stand tall, this is the sort of stuff that defines a caring community!

“Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.”
Princess Diana